Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Truthout 4/14

In Defense of Public School Teachers in a Time of Crisis
Henry A. Giroux, Truthout: "There has been a long, though declining, tradition in the United States in which public school teaching was embraced as an important public service. It was assumed that teachers provided a crucial foundation for educating young people in the values, skills and knowledge that enabled them to be critical citizens capable of shaping and expanding democratic institutions. Since the 1980's, teachers have been under an unprecedented attack by those forces that view schools less as a public good than as a private right." Read the Article

Palin Bags Boston: A Live Blog
Read William Rivers Pitt's blog posts from the Tea Party extravaganza held at Boston Common this Wednesday morning. Read the Article

Senator Leahy Pushes for More Patriot Act Oversight
Grace Huang, Truthout: "Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) released a letter Tuesday he sent previously to Attorney General Eric Holder, urging him to implement accountability provisions in the Patriot Act that Congress quietly renewed for one year in February." Read the Article

The Republican Strategy on Financial Reform: Make Democrats Look Like Patsies for the Street
Robert Reich: "Senate Republicans today debuted their new strategy for financial reform: Refuse to cooperate with Democrats on grounds that the Dems are too willing to give Wall Street what it wants. I'm not making this up." Read the Article

King Coal Says, "Live Free or Die"
Jim Hightower, Truthout: "By gollies, one group in our country has what it takes! One group has done more than just strut around at teabag rallies, barking loudly about nullification, secession, militias and other big-talk threats to stop federal intrusion into our lives and businesses." Read the Article

Bloody Nose for NUHW, Black Eye for SEIU
Carl Finamore, Truthout: "The 10-day federal civil trial is over, the verdict is in. The nation's largest union, SEIU, claimed victory on March 9 after a nine-person jury awarded them a total of $737,850 in damages spread out among 16 former officers and employees of their 150,000-member California local affiliate, United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW) and against their UHW rebel offshoot and chief California rival, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW)." Read the Article

Gods and Monsters: Fighting American Wars From on High
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com: "The Greeks had it right. When you live on Mount Olympus, your view of humanity is qualitatively different. The Greek gods, after all, lied to, stole from, lusted for, and punished humanity without mercy, while taking the planet for a spin in a manner that we mortals would consider amoral, if not immoral. And it didn't bother them a bit. They felt - so Greek mythology tells us - remarkably free to intervene from the heights in the affairs of whichever mortals caught their attention and, in the process, to do whatever took their fancy without thinking much about the nature of human lives." Read the Article

Main Street or Wall Street (Video)
Rachel Maddow interviews the chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP Elizabeth Warren on bailouts. Read the Article

No Way to Treat a Senator
Ruth Marcus: "There is something weird going on in the Republican Party when Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn is the voice of reason. There is something dangerous going on in the Republican Party when he is vilified for it." Read the Article

Justice Stevens: A Bold Ally
Deb Price: "In 2000, Justice John Paul Stevens powerfully dissented from the Supreme Court's 5-to-4 decision allowing the Boy Scouts of America to ban an exceptional young man - an Eagle Scout - from being a Scout leader simply because he was openly gay." Read the Article

Our Man in Afghanistan: Coming to Terms With Karzai
Fareed Zakaria: "President Obama keeps saying that he intends to win the war in Afghanistan. 'There will be difficult days ahead, but I am absolutely confident that we will succeed,' he promised in this year's State of the Union address." Read the Article

Who Threw Dawn Johnsen Under the Bus? (Video)
Laura Flanders, GRITtv: "Dawn Johnsen was one of Barack Obama's most progressive nominees; a strong voice for the rule of law, her nomination to the Office of Legal Counsel would have been clear message to the world that the days of torture memos and overreaching executive power were behind the US." Read the Article

Spy Story Sours a "Strategic Partnership"
J. Sri Raman, Truthout: "From a 'strategic partnership' to a spy thriller. That can describe today the trajectory of the special India-US ties, supposed to have been forged during the time of former President George W. Bush. A Pakistani-American with a confessed connection to the Mumbai terror strike of November 2008 is taking these relations on a rather bumpy ride." Read the Article

Mississippi School District Ordered to End Racial Segregation
Warren Richey, The Christian Science Monitor: "A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a Mississippi school district to halt local policies that had allowed some of the district's schools and classes to become racially segregated." Read the Article

The Really Really Long War
John Feffer, Foreign Policy in Focus: "Let's imagine that the Cold War was a detour. The entire 20th century, in fact, was a detour. Since conflicts among the 20th-century ideologies (liberalism, communism, fascism) cost humanity so dearly, it's hard to conceive of World War II and the clashes that followed as sideshows. And yet many people have begun to do just that. They view the period we find ourselves in right now - the so-called post-Cold War era - as a return to a much earlier time and a much earlier confrontation. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aren't discrete battles against a tyrant (Saddam Hussein) or a tyrannical group (the Taliban)." Read the Article

Farmers on Fringe of International Agriculture Policy?
Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service: "How's this for short-sighted: A billion people go hungry every day, food prices have climbed 30 to 40 percent, climate change is reducing agricultural production - and for the past two decades, the world has slashed investments in publicly-funded agriculture until it is a pittance in most countries." Read the Article

"I Do Pack, and I Will Not Blink"
Joe Meacham: "The country is in a bad place at the moment. As Evan Thomas and Eve Conant report this week, we are seeing a disturbing number of threats against lawmakers, a grim manifestation of the inchoate political and cultural anger on the American right." Read the Article